


For Your Eye Only

by hangdog



Series: The Respawn Conspiracy [1]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Bestiality, Bondage, Breathplay, Child Abuse, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Gore, Homophobic Language, Horror, Humiliation, M/M, Masochism, Medical Experimentation, Psychological Torture, Racism, Racist Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 10:08:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15168386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangdog/pseuds/hangdog
Summary: As Spy seeks fulfillment in extreme masochistic acts, Demo attempts to rescue him from an unpleasant fate.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: What you are about to read is vile, offensive garbage. Please note the tags.
> 
> This story incorporates characters from the comics, but it takes place before the current comic storyline.

Spy came to Demo’s bunk with explicit instructions. As Spy wished, Demo bound him hand and foot to the posts of Demo’s bed. Spy lay prone, his unmasked face pressed into his taut bicep.

“Use it,” Spy ordered. He was terribly bossy for someone so helpless.

Demo made Spy wait as he tested the leather belt in his palms. Spy often came to Demo’s room with the belt wound around his hand. The edges of the soft black leather were frayed from years of wear. Demo had never seen Spy wear anything in such poor shape. The mystery of this innocuous article of clothing, soon to be put to devilish use, appealed to Demo’s inebriated curiosity.

Even drunk, Demo knew in the back of his mind that he was stalling. He did not want to use the belt on Spy again, although recently, it was all that Spy wanted as foreplay. Watching Spy writhe and hiss in pain was not easy for Demo. Worse still was when Spy inevitably lost his battle with his emotions and began to weep as silently as he could. The soft gasps and sobs would nearly bring Demo to tears himself. Demo could not let Spy see how much this affected him. If Spy decided that Demo could not fulfill Spy’s needs, Spy would go to someone else. Demo would mask his concern, as he always did, by playing the part of Spy’s punisher.

Spy, if he had any knowledge of Demo’s inner struggle, showed little concern. “ _Fils de pute_. What are you waiting for?” Spy’s cruelty was customary at this stage. He seemed to think that it would make Demo hit him harder.

Rather, Demo could only stroke Spy’s back tenderly in response. Spy’s muscles bunched in fervent anticipation, refusing to relax under Demo’s touch. Demo savored the feeling of Spy’s soft, unbroken skin. “So eager,” said Demo. “Where’s yer dignity?”

Spy glared over his shoulder at Demo. “Do you want me to beg?”

Demo allowed himself a bracing swig of scrumpy before he answered, “Don’t get yer baguette in a twist.” He slammed the bottle of scrumpy down on the bedside table and held the belt by the buckle, so that the leather end would sail free like a whip. “Twenty should be enough to teach yeh some manners. Count fer me.”

The belt sang through the air and cut across the back of Spy’s ribcage. Demo used his whole arm, and Spy’s hollow gasp told him that the blow knocked the air from Spy’s lungs.

“Count, I said,” growled Demo, as Spy croaked for air. He hit Spy again, on the backs of his thighs, and paid close attention to how Spy’s hips reflexively jerked and lunged away from the pain. “Humping the bed already, you slut?” Demo beat Spy indiscriminately from his buttocks to his knees with quick but unforgiving blows, leaving a map of thick red welts in his wake. Spy’s legs, spread wide by his bound ankles, opened wider as Demo abused his backside, exposing the dusky swell of his vulnerable ball sack.

Demo couldn’t bring himself to hit Spy there yet, although he feared Spy would demand it before they were done. He distracted Spy, grasping Spy’s shaft in his hand and circling Spy’s glans with his thumb. Spy groaned and writhed against Demo’s palm. “Wet,” Demo announced disdainfully as he swiped his fingers through Spy’s drooling precum. “What sort of whore gets off on a beating?”

“Please,” Spy hissed through clenched teeth, “don’t stop.”

“Don’t worry, lad.” Demo released Spy’s cock and patted his buttocks. The lashes from the belt were hot to the touch. “Unless you start counting, we’ll be here all night.”

Spy looked over his shoulder again, but where there had been unbridled rage before, Demo now saw Spy’s cautious understanding of Demo’s intentions. Demo would play the part until Spy told him to stop in coded language. Spy met his eye briefly, nodded, and averted his gaze, as if he was ashamed of the necessity for the arrangement at all.

Spy’s shame was the catalyst for all of this. His masochism seemed to go beyond a mere sexual proclivity. Although Spy refused to discuss the subject, Demo sensed that he was punishing Spy for a deeper reason. Spy surrendered his body and mind to the abuse, absorbing himself in the pain.

Demo watched the process in action as he took up the belt again. He rolled his shoulder, popping it in the socket, and loosened his arm before he began to rain a frenzy of blows upon Spy. Each strike was like a spark completing a circuit, jolting Spy and tearing howls of pain from deep within him. Spy writhed in his bonds, intentionally exposing as much of himself as possible to be marked with burning red lines. Demo was creative in his placement and pacing. He alternated where he struck, first across Spy’s buttocks, then his back, then his thighs, always allowing a moment between blows for the pain to sink deep into the meat of Spy’s arse.

“Harder,” demanded Spy. “I want to bleed.”

There was only one way to accomplish that. Demo cringed. He had been careful not to hit the same place twice, and to use only the leather end of the belt, but Spy could tolerate far rougher treatment. Spy's neat and orderly stripes would soon vanish under a riot of bruises.

“Hit me!”

Demo switched the placement of the belt in his hands, presenting the buckle. The sharp metal prong stood out from the center frame of the belt buckle like the sting of a wasp. Demo clenched his teeth and slapped the cruel contraption down across the thickest part of Spy’s arse.

Despite this area’s extra padding, the impact forced a heartrending howl out of Spy. Demo was used to Spy’s unhinged mode of bliss by now, and he knew better than to stop before Spy purposefully stopped him. He used the buckle to its full potential as a tool of punishment, breaking Spy’s skin wherever it fell, from under his shoulders to the backs of his knees. He knew he had caught Spy’s balls when Spy jerked against the restraints and squealed.

“One,” gasped Spy.

Demo dropped the belt and rushed to Spy’s side. He reached for the rope that bound Spy's wrist.

Spy glared at him. “What are you doing?”

Demo loosened the knot, freeing Spy’s left hand. “You started counting.”

Spy used his new mobility to slap Demo’s face. “We are finished when I count to twenty!”

Demo hardly felt a thing. Spy had to feel worse, battered as he was. “I’ll break yer back if we go on.”

“Don’t worry about that,” hissed Spy. “Even if you beat me to death, I will return.”

“I wouldn’t do such a thing,” said Demo. God help him, but Spy looked disappointed. “Respawn’s not to be played with. It messes with yer head.”

Spy scoffed and turned aside. He untied his right hand with his left and twisted around to free his ankles.

“Please, don’t go,” begged Demo.

“What’s the use of staying here?” Spy wiped sweat and tears from his face with the corner of Demo’s blanket.

Demo reached for his scrumpy. He needed to brace himself for the ensuing discussion, if they could have one at all. “I’ll get ye off,” he proposed.

Spy scoffed again and extracted a cigarette from his silver case. His engraved lighter sparked under his chin, illuminating the hollows of his cheeks. He looked even more haggard than usual, and as he smoked, he struggled to suppress a deep, rib-rattling cough.

Demo sat down next to Spy and offered his scrumpy, which Spy refused with a wave of his hand. Even the slightest acknowledgement that Spy was paying attention emboldened Demo to speak more truthfully. “I’ll do whatever you like, Spy. If you can’t get off unless someone beats yeh, I’d rather it be me, than—”

“Shh.” Spy leaned against Demo’s side. Smoke curled under Demo’s chin and streamed into his nose. “You are a very generous lover, Tavish.”

Demo released tension that he didn’t even know he was carrying. He couldn’t embrace Spy without hurting him, so he covered Spy’s hand with his.

Spy stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray and turned to kiss Demo’s throat. He palmed Demo’s bare chest. As he nipped Demo’s jaw and climbed into his lap, Demo leaned back, supporting himself on one arm and giving Spy room to straddle him.

Spy didn’t move like someone who had just been belted. He held Demo’s shoulders and bounced on his cock, writhing and grinding against him, hungry deep inside. Demo had only to sit back and enjoy the ride. Even though Spy was being penetrated, Demo harbored no illusions about who was being fucked.

In the midst of their throes, Spy pushed Demo until he lay back against the bed. Spy kissed him deeply. His legs squeezed around Demo’s hips. They could not be closer together. Demo held back his climax just to prolong the moment.

Spy released Demo’s lips with a wet smack. Their eyes met. Simultaneously, they spoke.

“I love you,” said Demo.

“Hit me,” said Spy.

Demo looked away in shame.

“Hit me. I need it,” Spy confessed. “I can’t come without it.”

Demo held Spy’s face in his hands. He tried to convey as much as he could through the gentleness of his touch. Spy’s eyes began to water as Demo stared at him.

“Hit me, damn you,” choked Spy.

Demo took hold of Spy and flipped him on to his beaten back. Spy yelped and arched away from the bed, attempting in futility to spare himself from the punishing pressure.

Demo split Spy’s lip with the back of his hand. The shock of pain had Spy rolling his arse against Demo’s cock and clenching down hard. White light exploded in the center of Demo’s vision as Spy writhed under him.

Before Spy could demand it, Demo struck him again on the opposite side of the mouth. Spy grinned at him with bloody teeth. His manic expression meant he was close. He leaned in to kiss Demo, but Demo stopped him with a hand around his throat. A gentle squeeze made Spy’s entire body arch up like a bow. As Demo increased the pressure, Spy swooned back, his eyes fluttering and his face turning purple. He could barely make a sound when he came.

Demo tried to finish. He closed his eye so that he could focus on Spy’s flesh squeezing around him, but all he could think about were the bruises on Spy’s neck, and the sorry state of his back. Demo felt himself go limp. Awkwardly, he pulled out of Spy.

Spy draped his arm over his face in order to hide the tears that Demo knew were there. “I’ll suck you off,” he muttered. “Give me a moment.”

“Not after I fucked yer arse.” Demo fell beside Spy. “Me head’s spinning.”

They lay in silence, broken only by Spy’s occasional sniffle. Demo tried to embrace Spy and comfort him as he had so many times before, but Spy pushed Demo away and sat up, reaching for his cigarette case again.

Demo buried his disappointment and remained by Spy’s side. “Can I have one of those?”

Spy passed a cigarette to Demo and lit it for him.

“Thanks, lad.” Demo rarely smoked. The nicotine filled his head with a buzz that exacerbated his drunken vertigo. He closed his eye and endured the pitching of the earth beneath him.

“What do you want from me?” asked Spy.

Demo looked up at Spy quirked a smile. “Free fags.”

Spy did not smile back at him, but he did curl up against Demo’s side. Demo circled Spy’s shoulders loosely with his arm, mindful of his bruises, and lay quiet and content as Spy stroked his chest hair. Demo fell asleep. When he woke, Spy was gone, and that was the last Demo saw of him.

 

* * *

 

Weeks later, Spy was still missing. Demo had not seen him on the field since their encounter, but that wasn’t unusual in itself. Even if Spy wasn’t visible, he could still be creeping about.

Demo truly began to worry when Spy stopped making his habitual visits to Demo’s bedroom. He thought of Spy day and night, ruminating on his foolish declaration of love. He could not help but wonder if he was responsible for Spy’s sudden disappearance. He had pushed their tenuous connection too far.

When Demo asked the lads at work about Spy, Sniper was suspicious in his lack of response. He stared at his own feet, avoiding Demo's eye. Eventually, Sniper echoed the others and said he hadn’t seen Spy. Demo resolved to get the truth out of him.

Demo braced himself with a bottle and a half of rum before he crossed the desert to Sniper’s camper van that night. He lurched, shoulder-first, into the door, and dragged his knuckles over it in a failed attempt to knock. Objects clattered inside, followed by the sounds of Sniper cursing and pissing into a jar.

Demo finally accomplished a knock. “Open up!” he shouted. “Tell me where he is!”

The stream of urine cut off abruptly. “Demo?” Sniper muttered from within the van. He continued to piss. “Fuck off.”

Demo drained the last of his rum, smashed the bottle on the side of the van, and wielded the improvised weapon at Sniper’s window. “Get out here and fight like a man!”

Sniper opened the window and hurled the jar through the gap. Demo narrowly avoided the jar, aided in part by his drunken lack of balance. The glass shattered behind him and showered the sand in urine. Sniper cursed again, and glass clinked as he rummaged for another jar.

Demo tried to climb into the open window, but he wouldn’t fit. He roamed back to the camper’s door, backed away for a running start, and kicked the door open.

“Fuckin’ hell!” screamed Sniper, retreating up to his bunk. Demo cornered Sniper in the cramped space.

“Where is Spy?” Demo growled, brandishing the broken bottle up at Sniper. “Tell me, or you’ll be pissin’ from five holes!”

Sniper held his knife in front of him and raised his hand defensively. “I haven’t seen him in weeks, you maniac.”

“You haven’t?” Demo jabbed the bottle towards Sniper. “I know he fucks yeh!”

Sniper cringed and dragged his hat down over his face. His embarrassment was so blatant that Demo actually felt sorry for him.

“Don’t be shy, lad,” Demo said, changing tactics. “I jus’ want tae know where he’s gotten off to.”

Sniper refused to lower his knife. He clearly didn’t trust Demo’s drunken mood swing in the slightest. “Didn’t speak to him much,” Sniper said. “But he’s gone missing like this before. He took an outside assignment—he’ll come back eventually. Now, get out.”

“Not so fast.” Demo waved the broken bottle at Sniper’s face. “What’s this about outside assignments?”

Sniper flattened himself against the ceiling of his vehicle. “I don’t know! Something to do with his contract. Ask Pauling. Fuck,” he exclaimed, “all of this over that bloody backstabber?”

Demo wobbled on his feet and caught himself in the doorframe. “Don’t talk about him like that,” he slurred.

Sniper laughed darkly. “He’ll turn on you too, mate.”

Demo threw the bottle at Sniper’s head, missing by a wide margin. “Shut yer mouth!”

Sniper lunged at Demo and pushed him out of the van, slamming the broken door behind him. Demo fell on his hands and knees in the sand outside. He slumped to the ground and belched as anger turned to nausea in his ailing gut.

He heard the familiar sound of Sniper loading and readying his rifle. Demo felt eyes on the back of his head and knew that the barrel was pointed at him. He sighed,and waited for death. A cool puff of air flowed across his brain. He felt his skull explode in agony for a half second before his vision went black.

The Respawn system trivialized death to the point that the mercenaries routinely murdered one another in petty disputes without fear of consequences other than pain. The mysterious technology regenerated their bodies from the point at which they started working for RED and entered the Respawn scanner, three years ago. Each time Demo died and returned through Respawn, he regained the mild inebriation that he had during his first day, and he would drink his way back from there.

This time, as with every other, Demo’s consciousness reformed with something like a memory, or a missing memory whose absence he could only vaguely recall, of the uncanny void between death and Respawn. It was a nothingness that only existed in his recollection of it, made real by his thoughts. He made no difference to the abyss, alive or dead. Its immensity was such that he felt drawn to it as if through gravity. Demo knew that all of his pain would vanish as he became one with the void.

Demo lurched against the walls of the Respawn chamber, which was really just a repurposed metal cabinet bolted to the wall. Somehow, their bodies regenerated fully-clothed into this cabinet. Demo had tried to investigate the system on multiple occasions, but he found nothing out of ordinary about the metal locker. Engineer and Medic told Demo that they had made similar attempts to understand Respawn, with the same lack of result.

Demo had long since resolved to avoid Respawn at every opportunity. However, sometimes death was the fastest route back to the base. Moments ago, he was out in the desert by Spy’s van. Now, he was next to the control room. He could call Pauling on the emergency line and inquire about Spy.

Pauling did not want to give Demo any information. “First of all, it’s three in the morning,” she moaned, as if she hadn’t fallen asleep at her desk like she always did, “and second, I can’t compromise Spy’s location.”

“So he’s all right?”

An awkward silence passed between them. At last, Pauling said, “He’ll be fine. None of you can die, remember?”

“That doesn’t sound like he’ll be fine,” Demo said. “That sounds like whatever happens to him will be erased.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s getting paid. Good night.”

“Wait!” Demo searched the control room and blurted out, “I’ll hit the briefcase alarm.”

Pauling groaned. “Demo, please. He’s not worth it.”

“You mean he’s not worth yer job? Too bad.”

“You’re just creating tons of extra paperwork for both of us.”

“Me hand’s on the button,” threatened Demo.

“Damn it! He doesn’t work here anymore, all right? His contract was bought out by a competitor.”

Demo frowned. Sniper said that Spy would be back, and not a word about a competitor. “You mean BLU?”

“No. I’ll send you the details, but only if you acknowledge that you terminate your contract if you leave the base, forfeiting all earnings, benefits, and taking full legal and financial responsibility for—”

“Fine. Where is he?”

“Really?” Pauling hesitated, and then she began to type. “Okay, but I can’t tell you over the phone.” Demo could hardly hear Pauling over the sound of her terminal’s keyboard. “Stand by for the printout. You don’t need to stay on the line for this, so, bye. And don’t touch the briefcase alarm!”

The line died. Demo cursed and began to dial Pauling again, but before he completed her number on the rotary phone, the console in the control room blinked to life. The machinery thumped and rumbled inside of the wall, and with a mechanical squeal, a flimsy strip of paper curled out of the printer. Demo tore the paper loose and read it from the top.

Later that day, Demo embarked on a long trip to Brunei. Travel was miserable, and drunken travel was more miserable still. Demo had no choice but to leave behind his swords, as well as his explosive chemicals and devices, in order to board multiple planes. When he came to Spy’s defense, he would have to use whatever material he could find.

Demo played his last encounter with Spy over in his head. As he dwelled on his regret, he realized that he wanted to believe that Spy was missing because of the rift between them. It was easier than imagining endless horrific scenarios of Spy captured and tortured before Demo could save him. Sniper’s and Pauling’s dismissive remarks about Spy only fueled Demo’s worry. If Spy was truly as worthless to them as they claimed, why wouldn’t he have been sent on a dangerous mission with no concern for his well being?

Each leg of Demo’s journey was an opportunity to reflect on this, until he followed the directions on Pauling’s slip of paper to Spy’s new place of employment. Demo could not fathom what Spy was doing at an oil palm plantation off the coast of Borneo, but he would soon find out.


	2. Chapter 2

An obscenely opulent colonial mansion squatted at the center of the oil palm plantation, gleaming white in the midday sun. Every line of its architecture stood in defiance of the jungle that surrounded it. Demo’s boots left broad, muddy prints on the veranda as he approached the grand entrance. Two brass knockers in the shape of tigers' heads decorated the towering white doors. The tigers’ eyes had been sculpted to appear downcast, defeated, and altogether unsettling. Demo hesitated to knock.

The doors opened at once when he did. A white butler in a black suit scrutinized Demo’s rumpled and travel-worn appearance. He sniffed the fumes of alcohol that wafted from Demo’s person as the jungle humidity squeezed the sweat from Demo's pores. "Can I help you?" the butler asked in an East London accent.

“I'm looking for a man," said Demo. "He's tall, wears a ski mask."

The butler stared at Demo with an all-too-familiar expression, as if he was a raving madman.

"He's French," Demo added. "Works for RED."

The butler warmed instantly. "You must mean Monsieur Lapointe," he said.

"Who? I mean, yes," Demo said, plucking the badge that he had, fortunately, neglected to remove from his vest during his travels. "We’re both with RED, see?"

"Of course, Mister..."

"DeGroot," Demo answered. "Where is he?”

"He is...comfortable, by the pool."

"Well, all right!" Demo moved to enter, but the butler seamlessly blocked his path.

"I have just had these floors polished, Mister DeGroot. Please wait here whilst I—"

"To Hell with yer floors!" Demo shoved past the butler, invading the spotless foyer with a shower of dirt. "This 'Lapointe' owes me an explanation. Now, where's the bloody pool?"

"Sir, please—"

"Nevermind! I'll find it meself." Demo marched ahead on the marble floors. Throughout the mansion’s vast hallways, beheaded elephants, orangutans, leopards, and crocodiles crowded the walls. Hunting trophies seemed to be the primary decorations. There was something strange about the mounted animal heads. Demo thought that he saw a tiger blink, but perhaps he had simply enjoyed too many cocktails at the airport. Finally, Demo turned a corner and discovered sliding glass panes that opened to a vast courtyard. The sun glittered in a crystalline swimming pool and caught the reflection of a foil screen.

In a slatted chaise, wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses and a sheen of lotion, Spy peacefully tanned.

Spy did not notice Demo at all. His cleanly waxed chest rose and fell in peaceful slumber. His ribs were less prominent than usual, and his brown nipples rested high on the healthy swell of his olive-gold muscles. His fingers held a reflective tanning screen in a loose grip. All of Spy’s body hair was gone, save for a neat triangle above his prick. Demo had never seen a more relaxed expression on Spy's face. It was almost a shame to interrupt his beauty rest.

Almost. "Well, well," said Demo.

Spy dropped the tanning foil on his chest and seized the arms of the chaise. Demo was close enough to see his wide eyes through the dark glasses.

“What are you doing here?” gasped Spy.

“Is the spa still open?” Demo stepped forward, crowding Spy in the chaise. “I’ll start with a massage. Should I take me clothes off, too?”

“You can’t be here,” Spy said. Demo noticed stiffness in Spy’s back as he sat up. “You have to leave.”

“By whose authority? Yer new boss?” Demo leaned over Spy. “You didn’t tell me you were leaving.”

“I would have come back, you fool.” Spy slapped his palms into Demo’s chest, pushing him away. “It’s not too late. Go, now.”

“I don’t think so. I think I’ll stay right here and work on me tan.” Demo collapsed into the chaise next to Spy’s and folded his hands over his chest.

Spy stood over him, cock and balls dangling, fists clenched. “You don’t understand the situation,” he growled.

“I understand enough,” Demo said, with a pointed glance at Spy’s bare crotch. “I thought you were in real danger.”

“This is vastly more complex than you are prepared to handle,” said Spy. “If you knew-”

Demo watched the blood drain from Spy’s face. “What? What is it?”

“Silence,” said Spy, looking at something behind Demo. “Whatever happens, don’t interfere.”

Demo turned. The open glass doors framed a stately man with a neatly trimmed gray beard. He had the lazy, menacing posture of a big cat. His sleeves molded to his biceps like the wet-fold marble of a Renaissance statue, and his paw of a hand gripped the red jeweled head of a gleaming wood cane. As the man approached, his measured prowl proved that the cane was merely for show.

“Monsieur Lapointe,” drawled the English expat, “you brought a plus one.”

“Darling,” Spy responded, his tone so warm and cloying that Demo at once heated with jealousy. “You know of my associates. This is the Demoman.”

“Charles Darling,” the stranger introduced himself. “You must be Tavish DeGroot.” Demo hated his name in Darling’s mouth nearly as much as he hated the frissions of tension that coiled through Spy at every word. Darling gestured, and another servant, a Malay boy, appeared with a laden silver tray. “A scotch for our guest.”

Spy touched his arm. Demo ignored him and grabbed the bottle from the tray. He ignored the provided glasses and tipped the bottle to his mouth. It was a rare and exquisitely good whisky, and he tasted none of it.

Darling spoke into the servant’s ear. The boy glanced at Spy and hurried back inside. Darling turned to Demo and asked, “What brings you to my property unannounced, DeGroot?”

Spy placed himself between the two glaring men. “Mr. DeGroot is a close friend. I extended an invitation to him.” He circled Demo’s shoulders with his arm. “You will find that you have much in common.”

“Aye,” growled Demo. Spy’s manicured fingernails punctured his skin in warning. “We both have ‘unfinished business’ with ‘Monsieur Lapointe.’”

“Do we?” Darling canted his head. “Then you understand the arrangement. Come here, Lapointe. And take off those ridiculous glasses.”

Spy obeyed, placing the glasses on the chaise. He knelt before Darling and reached for his belt. Demo's heart sank as he realized what was about to happen.

“Spy, wait,” said Demo.

Spy ignored him and opened his mouth, swallowing Darling's long, fat cock. Darling seized Spy by the back of the head and pumped mercilessly into the back of his throat. Spy gagged and spasmed, clutching Darling’s thighs.

“Let him go!”

Darling laughed cruelly and held Spy’s face flush against his pelvis, plunging his prick as deep as it could go down Spy's throat. “The old whore loves this,” said Darling, as Spy's face turned purple. “He needs to be shown his place. Right, Lapointe?”

Darling jerked Spy’s head backwards with a harsh grip in his hair. Spy gulped a deep breath and rasped, “Yes,” with such lustful intensity that Demo felt a shameful stirring in his balls. “Please, sir, fuck my throat.” Darling maintained eye contact with Demo as he dragged his glistening cock over Spy's face and slapped it across his cheeks. “Please, sir, use my mouth,” begged Spy.

“This is his favorite type of work.” Darling placed the head of his cock on Spy's outstretched tongue. He slowly dragged the tip back and forth, using the soft pink flesh as he pleased. “He was made for this.”

Demo could no longer watch. He was still holding the bottle of whisky. As he raised it to his lips, he imagined smashing it and mutilating Darling with the broken glass. Spy’s request not to interfere, as well as Demo’s own trepidation, kept him bolted to the spot. Demo chugged the whisky, but the lurid wet sounds of Darling skullfucking Spy remained as vivid at the end of the bottle as they were at the beginning.

“Look here, DeGroot,” said Darling. “I thought you understood what sort of creature this is.” Once again, he thrust down Spy’s throat, but this time he did not let up when Spy’s air ran out. Spy’s eyes rolled up into his head as he submitted to the suffocation.

“You’ll kill him,” said Demo, stupidly. He knew that Spy couldn’t die.

“He should be so lucky.” When Spy’s body went limp, Darling withdrew from his mouth and dropped Spy to the tile floor. Thin breaths wheezed between Spy’s parted lips as Darling jerked himself to completion across Spy’s face, neck, and chest.

Demo moved towards Spy, but Darling held out his arm. “Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s getting paid.”

Demo shoved past Darling and knelt down beside Spy, who regained consciousness as Demo took him into his arms. “All right, lad?” Demo murmured. Spy turned away from Demo, hiding his soiled face with his hand.

Darling brayed with laughter. “Now I see why he dared to invite you here. I shall teach you how to treat him properly.”

“Yes,” answered Spy at once. He prostrated himself before Demo. “Please let me serve you.” Demo gaped at Spy, at a loss for words. Spy lifted his head to meet Demo’s eye. “Let me show you what I am.”

“We’ll start with a punishment worthy of your presumption, Lapointe,” interrupted Darling. “I can’t allow guests unannounced.”

“I won’t let you degrade him anymore.” Demo approached Spy. “Go on, lad, get up. Yer comin’ with me.” Spy shook his head. “Whatever he’s paying, I’ll give ye from my salary.” Demo attempted to help Spy to his feet, but Spy resisted him and stayed where he was, his naked front flush against the ground. Spy’s back was bruised in a pattern of thin, horizontal lines. Demo ground his teeth and tried not to imagine how they appeared on Spy.

“Your outrage is wasted on this base creature, DeGroot,” said Darling. He lifted his cane and pointed the end towards one of the metal-framed outdoor dining chairs on the patio. Spy crawled towards the chair on his hands and knees, his head hanging low. Spy turned the chair backwards and mounted it from behind, grasping the front legs with his hands. The chair was just tall enough to make Spy rise to his toes. Demo imagined that the padding on the back of the chair was little comfort for the points of Spy’s hips.

Demo wanted to repeat that Spy could simply join him and leave, but he knew it would accomplish nothing. Spy, evidently, wanted every second of this disgrace, from someone who had no care for him at all. Demo knew then that his purpose had changed. He would no longer try to remove Spy from the situation. Instead, Demo would protect Spy from his own desires.

Darling circled Spy, patting his flanks. “I don't even need to tie him down,” he said to Demo. Darling continued to chat about Spy as if he was a dumb animal. “You would be amazed at what he can endure.”

Demo bared his teeth. “If he won't fight yeh, I will.”

“I have a better idea.” Darling smiled with fake pleasantry. “You could grant his wish and repay my hospitality with some entertainment.” At this point, the young servant returned, bearing a leather-handled riding crop. Darling directed him to give the crop to Demo. The boy nervously glanced at Demo’s face and hurried inside, but Demo saw him looking out through the glass.

Demo squeezed his fist around the crop. If he was to abuse Spy's defenseless backside, he would do so with the lightest possible strokes of the whip. Demo snapped the crop across Spy's arse, producing a satisfying crack without much of an impact. He peppered Spy with fleeting pink marks in this manner, tapping him along the backs of his exposed thighs.

“Beat him properly,” Darling interjected.

Demo ignored him and cupped half of Spy's arse in his hand, sinking his fingers into Spy's yielding buttock. Spy's skin was already hot to the touch. Demo slapped Spy with his palm.

Spy broke his subservient silence with a growl. If they were alone, Spy would have been barking orders by now. _Harder! Hit me. Make me bleed._ Stripped of all power and control, Spy could only tremble with need. Spy’s desperation for punishment lay bare to Demo, and he could only give Spy what he wanted.

Demo cracked the crop across Spy's arse and watched Spy shudder in appreciation. Spy’s back had been stiff, but as Demo put more force behind the blows, Spy relaxed with a soft groan of relief. Each successive blow seemed to drain more tension from Spy without affecting his overall posture. Demo was awestruck by the grace of Spy’s body as he endured the awkward position and the painful blows of the crop. Spy balanced on the balls of his feet, thighs trembling but steady, pushing his arse high into the air so that his hips did not support all of his weight across the back of the chair.

Demo tested Spy with a series of particularly vicious strikes, putting all of his strength into them, but keeping a steady pace so that Spy felt the impact of each. Every time the crop bit into Spy’s legs or arse, Spy spasmed forward, rattling the chair across the floor until Demo pulled him back into position. A nasty red welt began to form on the seam between Spy’s arse and thighs, and Demo exacerbated the injury, pummeling it until the line spotted with blood. He repeated the tactic across Spy’s backside, stroking the crop many times over the same spot, so that the blows cut progressively deeper into Spy.

Demo watched Spy so closely, waiting for signs that Spy was about to fall from the chair or cry for mercy, that he forgot about Darling. It was only when Demo stepped back for a moment to adjust his grip on the crop that he caught sight of Darling from the corner of his eye. Darling stretched back in the chaise with his arm pillowed behind his head. His other hand, wrapped in a slip of fabric, stroked his cock. Demo recognized the pattern from one of Spy's fine silk ties. Darling looked into Demo’s eye and smirked.

Demo channeled his ensuing rage into the crop, hitting Spy indiscriminately across his body. He soon regretted it. Spy jerked from side to side as Demo assaulted him at every angle, battering his ribs until Demo could see the pain in Spy’s labored breaths. Demo transferred his attention to the more padded target of Spy’s backside, but the damage was done. Spy’s knees buckled under him as his feet slipped, hanging him over the chair on his groin. Spy made a wretched sound, keening, “Please, fuck me.”

Demo threw the crop aside and fumbled hastily with his belt. He heard Darling clear his throat and ignored him; likewise, Spy continued to beg. “I need you to fuck me now, Tavish. Please.”

Hot, shameful arousal burned from Demo’s stomach to his balls. Spy never addressed him with such humility, such bare need. He was not simply ordering Demo to perform a disposable role in his fantasy. Spy was completely in Demo's control. He trusted Demo to lead him through the pain into pleasure.

Demo leaned against Spy from behind, purposefully pinning Spy's bruised thighs against the back of the chair with his knees. He thrust his exposed cock over Spy's ass, humping Spy just to feel the heat of his abused skin. When Spy started begging for a faster fuck, Demo interrupted him with two fingers in his mouth. Spy obediently sucked, and when Demo crooked those wet fingers inside of Spy's arse, Spy rocked back against him, spreading his feet apart.

Demo pulled Spy towards him. He was just tall enough to manage their position, at the cost of hanging Spy over the chair on his stomach. Spy barely seemed affected by the discomfort, or indeed by anything other than Demo's cock as it finally entered Spy. They both groaned in unison, as if they had simultaneously slid into a hot bath.

“Christ,” Demo gasped. Spy was tight and needy, squirming against and around him. Demo held on to Spy's hips and angled himself directly into Spy's prostate. He pounded it until Spy screamed incoherently and shot cum down the back of the chair, and he continued fucking Spy mercilessly through the aftershocks, milking Spy's prostate until their seed mingled in a puddle on the ceramic tile floor.

Demo kissed Spy's shoulder. “Hard enough for yeh?” It was a playful quip meant to alleviate some of Spy's tension, but Spy didn't respond. Demo felt Spy shuddering with exertion as he continued to hold himself over the chair.

Demo reluctantly separated himself from Spy. A groan from Darling caught his attention. Regrettably, Demo witnessed Darling ejaculate into Spy's designer necktie, marking it just as he had marked Spy’s face.

“Use this rag to clean the mess you've made, Lapointe.” Darling tossed the tie to the floor in front of Spy, who painfully clambered off the chair. Spy returned to his hands and knees to sop his cum from the tile floor with silk harvested on a Tuscan microfarm. Demo knew every detail about Spy’s clothing, as it was one of the few personal topics upon which Spy would expound at length. Spy selected his wardrobe with a curator’s eye. While he could kill a man with utmost comfort, Spy reacted like a soaked cat if a spot of blood touched his fancy shirt. To see Spy crawling about on the ground, abjectly scrubbing his own seed with his necktie, was surreal.

When Spy finished his task, Darling sorted out his clothing and stood from his chaise. “I must say, it does add to the experience to have you here, DeGroot,” he said to Demo. “Everything feels new again, though I’ve had him so many times before.”

Demo clenched his fist. “You’ve made yer point.”

“So I have. I will now be a gracious host and permit you to use him as you wish.”

Demo growled, “Will yeh be watchin’ us?”

“If you need an audience to achieve climax, you will have to wait until tomorrow.” Darling looked at Spy, who immediately dropped his forehead to the ground. “Treat him well, whore,” Darling admonished Spy.

“Yes, sir,” Spy answered hoarsely. “Thank you, sir.”

Darling laughed. “I love the sound of a well-fucked throat. Enjoy him, DeGroot. You’ve earned it. Why don’t you have another scotch as well?” He snapped his fingers, and the young servant emerged from hiding and presented a bottle.

Demo gripped the whisky by the neck. Every instinct told him to attack Darling. Darling made no attempt to hide his amusement at Demo’s rage, and out of spite, Demo restrained himself. Darling laughed a final time and left Demo, Spy, and the young servant by the pool in the fading sunlight. The boy wordlessly attempted to lead Demo inside as well. “Away with ye,” grumbled Demo, waving his hand. The boy flinched away from him and hurried inside after Darling.

Demo went to Spy and extended his arms, but Spy slapped Demo’s hands away and stood by his own power. “Now, love,” Demo began to plead.

Spy cracked the back of his hand across Demo’s cheek. The shock was worse than the pain. Demo touched his face and smiled cautiously at Spy. “Are we even now, or do yeh want another?” Spy used his palm to slap the other side of Demo’s face. Demo winced and backed away. “All right—”

Spy lifted his hand again, but Demo caught his arm. “I came to help ye,” Demo said.

“Beating me was a great help,” sneered Spy.

“I thought yeh liked it!”

Spy groaned in frustration. “I had to play along to protect you.”

“What does that mean?” Demo released Spy. “They said Respawn works out here.”

“Death is not the worst that could happen. You will become a victim of circumstance if you stay.”

“ _I’m_ the victim?”

“Only one of us is a hapless idiot who interferes in matters beyond his scope. I am fully in control of everything,” Spy insisted, as he wiped cum from his face.

“Aye, ye look to be in control from where I’m standing.” Demo regretted his rejoinder when Spy stepped away from him.

Spy considered Demo coolly. “How did you know where to find me?”

Demo answered, “I threatened Pauling.” Spy raised his eyebrow. “I told her I’d hit the briefcase alarm.”

“That was enough to betray my location,” lamented Spy. “She gave you no other details?”

“No, and neither did Sniper.”

Spy recoiled with overdramatic disgust. “The bushman?”

“That’s right. I know yeh fucked him, and I don’t care. Nor do I care about that arsehole Darling.” Demo reached for Spy. “I only care about you.”

Spy evaded Demo’s grasp. “You are wasting my time.”

Demo pursued Spy. He grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Look at me!” Spy refused and glared at the ground. Demo spoke anyway, crowding Spy’s face with his. “Everyone’s treating you like a disposable asset, including yerself. I know yer too proud to ask for help, but that’s what I’m offering. And I’m offering more,” Demo added hastily. “Anything you need.”

Demo’s heartfelt speech did not affect Spy as he hoped. Spy glared at him, and Demo swallowed a lump in his throat. “I don’t need you,” said Spy. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Ye don’t mean that.”

“How many times have you declared these pathetic feelings for me? How many times must I break your heart before you learn? You are the real masochist.”

“You just don’t want to say what’s going on. That’s why yer acting like this,” Demo reasoned, as tears pooled in his eye.

Spy gave unquestioning orders. “I will arrange your transportation. You will leave within the hour.”

“Not a chance.” Demo threatened, “I’ll ruin yer contract with Darling.”

Spy snapped back, “You already ruined everything when you said you loved me. I have not been clear enough. To me, you are nothing but a big cock attached to a stinking drunk.”

Demo forced a watery smile. “Big, is it?”

“I used you because you are a feeble-minded addict. You were easy to control, but you are no longer worth my effort.” Spy watched coldly as Demo staggered into one of the chaises and took several long pulls of whisky. “Stop making a fool of yourself.”

“All right!” shouted Demo. “Enough! I’ll leave. I’m sorry I came here. Just—shut yer mouth and leave me be.”

“You’re going to fall asleep there, like the useless drunk you are.”

“Believe me, I don’t want to be around you a moment longer.” Demo paused to guzzle more of the whisky. The more Spy mocked him, the more Demo needed to drink. “I’ll finish this bottle and be on me way.”

Spy wrinkled his nose. “Of course you will.” He strode away from Demo, arrogant despite his battered nakedness, or perhaps because of it.

Demo closed his eye and lowered the bottle. He had no intention of leaving, but the first bottle of whisky was catching up to him, along with the jet lag. He would rest for a few minutes and give Spy time to overcome his anger. As vicious as Spy had been, Demo did not believe the things he said. They had shared too many tender moments. Spy would not trust Demo to soothe his tears if he truly hated him.

Demo longed to hold Spy now. As much as he loathed the violent acts that Spy demanded, he loved embracing and comforting Spy in the aftermath. Spy was never more vulnerable than he was as he wept openly into Demo’s shoulder. When Spy’s tears ran dry, he would stay in Demo’s arms until he fell asleep. Spy would express his gratitude with gentle kisses and sweet whispers. _Mon coeur, mon cher, mon grand._

As the whisky sloshed through Demo’s brain, flooding his mind with memories, he became vaguely aware of someone pulling his arm. He resisted and said something to make them go away. That seemed to work. He was alone again.


	3. Chapter 3

Moments later, sunlight flicked through Demo’s eyelid and ignited a fire in his head. Hadn’t he been facing away from the sun? Demo groaned and shielded his face with his hand.

“Rise and shine,” growled an American voice that Demo didn’t recognize. A silhouette blocked the light, so vast that Demo thought of Heavy. “You’re trespassing.”

Demo rolled on to his side and covered his head with his arm. “G’wan, then,” he muttered. He was convinced that this was a dream. To his surprise, two very real pairs of hands seized each of his arms and hauled him to his feet.

Demo reluctantly opened his eye. After his vision painfully adjusted to the light, he saw a beast of an old man in tactical gear standing in front of him. The old man grinned like a shark and eyed Demo through a pair of blue goggles. Two other blue-uniformed men held Demo’s arms immovably. When Demo struggled, they twisted his arms to the breaking point.

“They replaced me with _this?_ ” complained the man at Demo’s left.

Demo had no opportunity to comment that he worked for RED, not BLU, and they could go fuck themselves besides, before the old man with the goggles punched him in the stomach. Demo heaved and vomited bile and whisky on to his own boots.

The men groaned in unison and dropped Demo into his sick. “Pick him up, Greg,” ordered the one in goggles.

“The hell I will,” answered Greg, who had claimed that Demo was his replacement. Demo tried to stand, but Greg stopped him with a kick in the jaw. Demo’s chin split on the end of his boot as his head snapped backwards. Demo stayed down, clutching his head.

“Ross, pick him up.”

The third man answered, “With all due respect, Jones, I am retired.” Ross had a bushy gray beard, which he stroked as he stood off to the side. “Darling ain’t paying us, neither.”

Jones cracked his knuckles. “Okay, I’ll handle him, but I get dibs on Darling’s gimp.”

“Too late. Bea went right to him. She’s probably sitting on his face by now.”

“That fat bitch.”

As Demo realized with horror that they were talking about Spy, a meaty hand grabbed the back of his neck. Jones lifted Demo easily, like a scruffed kitten. When Demo swung back at Jones, the old man responded by flattening Demo’s nose with his knuckles. Demo collapsed to the floor a second time.

Demo was dimly aware of Jones pulling his arms behind his back. Metal cuffs bit into his wrists. “Move it, DeGroot,” said Jones, shocking Demo with his own name. He grabbed Demo by his cuffs and lifted his arms behind his back until Demo groaned in agony and stood on his feet. “Atta boy. Let’s go.”

Jones marched Demo inside of the mansion. Demo’s nose trailed drops of blood on the marble floor as he stumbled next to Jones. They followed the main hall until they reached a pair of open doors. Demo forced himself to lift his pounding head as they entered the dining room.

A hefty woman straddled Spy’s head at one end of a long wooden table. She wore a blue boilersuit that appeared to open with a zipper along the crotch. Her voluminous buttocks formed a seal around Spy’s face, engulfing him up to the neck. Spy fought to free himself, but he couldn’t move her weight. As Demo and Jones approached, Spy’s struggles began to fade.

“He can’t breathe,” snarled Demo. “Get off of him!”

When the woman turned to him, Demo noticed a disfiguring burn across her face and scalp that had destroyed one of her eyes. The woman rolled her remaining eye and wriggled her hips, grinding her fanny into Spy’s face. “What’s the matter?” she mocked. “You don’t like it when I do this?” She was also an American, and she appeared to be similar in age to the others. Demo could not imagine that Spy enjoyed being suffocated by her doughy flesh.

“I’ll kill yeh!” Demo strained towards Spy, but Jones kept hold of him. Footsteps approached, telling Demo that others were entering. “I’ll kill all of yeh!” shouted Demo.

Darling passed them and took a seat at the head of the long dining table. Greg and Ross sat nearby.

“Really, DeGroot,” tutted Darling, “I invite you to enjoy my servant, on my property, and this is how you return my hospitality?”

“Take yer hospitality and shove it up yer arse!” Demo looked desperately at Spy, but just as Spy stopped moving completely, the woman lifted her bulk and allowed Spy to breathe again.

“Almost done, Bea?” asked Jones, as he continued to restrain Demo.

Bea huffed. “You’re rushing me.”

Demo resorted to stomping and kicking Jones out of desperation, but the bigger man seemed unaffected by Demo’s struggles.

“Ahem,” interrupted Darling, tapping his cane on the marble floor. “You may all have your turn, as soon as Mr. DeGroot is under control.”

“No problem, chief.” Jones wrestled Demo into one of the dining chairs, forcing Demo’s handcuffed arms over the back of the chair to keep him in place.

“Shitebags!” Demo screamed.

“Gag him.” Darling reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a bundled kerchief. He unwrapped Spy’s necktie, still crusted with Darling’s cum. “Use this.”

Demo’s empty stomach roiled. “No,” he protested, but Jones was already holding the necktie and jamming it between Demo’s teeth. The fabric bit into the edges of Demo’s mouth as Jones knotted it tightly behind Demo’s head. Demo shook his head and retched at the bitter taste on the back of his tongue.

“Much better,” cooed Bea in a saccharine tone, as she sank back down on Spy’s face and gyrated her hips in winding, indulgent circles. Again, Spy thrashed against the table, and her flesh muffled his cries for mercy.

“Hurry up, Bea,” snapped Jones. He was still standing by Demo, and as Demo twisted his head in every direction to try and loosen the gag, he noticed that Jones was stroking himself through his pants. Jones clearly intended to take Spy next.

“You’ll know when I’m done with him, okay?” Bea dragged her hips back and forth, using the geometry of Spy’s face from every angle to stimulate her dripping cunt. Each time she lifted her arse to allow Spy to breathe, Spy’s face was covered in yet more glistening juice. Eventually, Spy stopped fighting and obediently serviced Bea with his mouth.

Bea moaned and dragged her hands across her massive tits, gripping handfuls through her blue jumpsuit as she ground her cunt into Spy’s nose. She was so much larger than Spy that Demo genuinely feared that she would kill him. Worse still, she appeared to enjoy the sensation of Spy suffocating against her pussy, and she brought Spy to the brink of oblivion again and again. When she finally orgasmed, she squeezed her thighs around Spy’s head, as if she wanted to crush his skull.

Demo howled helplessly through the necktie. Blood coated his palms as he fought the handcuffs. To his dismay, Demo noticed the others smirking and laughing at him around the table. Darling leaned back in his chair and flashed his teeth at Demo, watching gleefully as Demo was forced to taste his cum.

Bea dismounted Spy at last and staggered into a chair, weak-kneed. “Whew! The old tramp’s still got it.”

Spy lay back on the table, shuddering and spasming as he gasped for air. Bea’s fluids plastered Spy’s thin hair to his scalp, and his face was still dark and flushed. He met Demo’s eyes and immediately turned his head away. The gag muffled Demo’s attempt to reassure Spy.

“How come you never brought the negro around before?” Jones asked Darling conversationally as he unfastened his belt. He laughed at Demo’s enraged growl.

“Lapointe took it upon himself to extend the invitation,” answered Darling. “I was merely so kind as to allow him to stay. I hope you’re enjoying the entertainment, DeGroot,” Darling said, smirking. “It’s the least I could do to thank you for your spirited performance earlier.”

Demo knew that his struggles served only to amuse the people gathered around the table. He clenched his jaw, and gagged again as the cum-soaked tie dragged against his palate. His revulsion was funniest of all to the others. The old men and woman grinned and clapped at him as if he was a sideshow attraction.

Horrible memories assaulted Demo. As a young boy that had accidentally killed his own adoptive parents, and the only black child in the Ullapool orphanage, Demo was constantly isolated as a subject of ridicule. Demo’s nascent fascination with explosives only worsened the situation. It wasn’t long before another child witnessed Demo mixing chemicals and consulting a demolitions manual. The other boy immediately informed the staff, and Demo lived for months in confinement until his birth parents came for him. During that time, the other children tormented Demo by knocking on the door of his cell, provoking his rage, and running away in peals of laughter.

Demo had repressed that particular trauma for decades. He shuddered when his overwhelming anxiety manifested as nausea. Bile burned the back of his throat as he dry heaved again.

While Demo fought to control himself, Jones bullied Spy into a different position. He flipped Spy on to his stomach and dragged Spy’s legs over the edge of the table. Spy grunted as Jones breached him. “You like that, you little faggot?”

“Pssht,” scoffed Bea.

“Nothing queer about giving a faggot what he deserves,” Jones growled. He thrust harshly into Spy, crushing Spy against the table and rattling the wood every time his hips impacted Spy’s arse. Spy made little noise, until Jones grabbed the back of Spy’s neck and slammed Spy’s cheek into the table just to hear him cry out in pain. After that, Spy dutifully moaned every time Jones hilted inside of him, whimpering to the cadence of their balls slapping together.

Demo shut his eye, but Jones ensured that he could still hear every detail of his conquest of Spy. Demo could not retreat to his own thoughts, because it was impossible not to remember the orphanage with his snickering audience. Neither could Demo tolerate the present. He had failed to provide any help to Spy, and now he was forced to witness this deranged group as they used his precious lover like a cheap sex toy.

Jones battered Spy’s arse with his hands, thrusting erratically as he neared completion. Although Jones had not lasted long, he had compacted hours of punishment into minutes of rough sex. When Jones finished with him, Spy cringed in pain and clutched at his own midsection.

“Aw, Jonesie’s tired,” said Bea. “Doc, can’t you cure his limp dick?”

Demo started in confusion. Somehow, he expected to see Medic when he looked up, but aside from his similar style of round framed glasses, the white-haired man that entered the room was unfamiliar. Under his lab coat, he was dressed in a blue uniform like the other mercenaries.

“Jones is strong as an ox,” said Doc. His accent sounded American, but strange in a way that Demo couldn’t identify. Doc frowned at Demo. “Who’s this?”

“TF replaced me with that nigger, Doc,” complained Greg.

Doc stared unblinkingly at Demo as he answered Greg. “That’s a shame. You shouldn’t have retired.”

Demo returned the stare, hoping in futility that his own expression didn’t betray his revulsion and panic. Doc surveyed Demo as if he was a pile of parts waiting to be disassembled. Demo was used to such looks from Medic, but he had no guarantee that Doc would put him back together again.

“I can retire whenever I want,” Greg continued to moan.

“Jesus Christ, Greg, shut the fuck up.” Jones slumped in a chair next to Bea, tilting his head back as he caught his breath. “Get your rocks off if it’ll stop you feeling sorry about yourself.”

“I don’t feel sorry about myself!” Greg got up and loomed over Spy, who had stayed where Jones left him, slumped over the table. “I don’t really want your sloppy seconds,” Greg mused as he looked at Spy.

“His mouth is excellent,” Darling suggested.

Greg acquiesced and grabbed Spy by the ears, knocking him to the floor. Spy struggled to stay upright on his knees as Greg pumped his cock into Spy’s throat.

“Do you have any plans for this one, Darling?” asked Doc, indicating Demo.

Darling swirled a glass of red wine. “Well, he’s not in my employ, so I suppose I don’t care what happens to him.”

“Hmm.” Doc circled Demo, studying him from all angles. “Interesting.”

Demo glared at Doc and twisted his hands in the cuffs. Blood was beginning to trickle into Demo's palms from his chafed wrists. Given time, Demo could use his blood to slip free. If he had to dislocate his thumbs in the process, he would endure the pain to escape this waking nightmare.

Spy gagged loudly, attracting the attention of everyone in the room. Greg pinned Spy’s face against his groin and ground his pubis into Spy’s nose as he jammed his cock into the back of Spy’s throat. Spy clawed at Greg’s legs and spasmed against him as Greg came into Spy’s windpipe. Spy coughed and retched, and Greg’s spunk dripped from his nose.

Greg grimaced in disgust and pushed Spy away. “I thought you fixed his gag reflex, Doc,” Greg accused.

“I did. Stop malingering, Lapointe.” Doc slapped Spy on the back of the head like a schoolmaster disciplining an unruly pupil. Spy instantly stopped coughing, and he glanced at Demo for a split second before he averted his gaze subserviently to the floor.

“Doc,” interrupted Ross, who had been stroking his beard silently up to that point, “While we’re on the subject, can you make him any younger?”

“He couldn’t make him young enough for you,” snickered Bea.

“Ross, you stupid bastard,” said Greg. “If Doc could make people young again, you think he’d waste it on some French hooker?”

“Shut _up_ already!” shouted Jones.

Darling sighed and lowered his wine. “Gentlemen, please.”

As the mercenaries bickered and screamed at one another, Demo checked Spy for injuries. Other than the marks from the beating Demo had given him earlier, Spy wasn’t in terrible shape. He held up well for someone that had just been brutally fucked and suffocated in tandem. As Spy looked back at Demo, Spy’s brow slackened, softening his eyes with pity for Demo.

Demo wasn’t sure if he should be angry or grateful that Spy was the one feeling sorry for him. In his quest to protect Spy, Demo had inadvertently created more problems for them both. Spy’s cruelty in their last conversation now made perfect sense: Spy had been trying to drive Demo away before he witnessed Spy’s degradation and fell victim to his captors.

Demo tried to convey his feelings to Spy with his expression. The necktie cinched around his head, distorting Demo’s mouth and preventing him from smiling, but as he subtly tipped his head towards Spy, Spy responded with a small nod of his own.

“All right,” Ross interjected, standing from the table. “If that’s settled, I’m taking my turn.”

Demo looked around in surprise. He had stopped paying attention to the mercenaries and Darling as they argued, but they seemed to have settled their differences and returned to the matter of abusing Spy.

Spy flinched away when Ross initially reached for him, prompting another round of laughter. “Don’t be scared. Ross is gentle with the little ones,” cackled Bea. Ross ignored her as he rolled a condom over his shaft.

Jones lit a cigarette. “Really? A rubber?” he commented between drags.

“Who knows where he’s been,” grunted Ross. “Or any of y’all, for that matter.” He took Spy’s arm and pushed him back on the table, holding Spy’s legs up in the air. Spy hissed in pain as Ross penetrated his sore, puffy arsehole.

“Take it like a man, faggot.” Jones blew smoke into Spy’s face. Spy readily inhaled the second hand nicotine, his breath hitching each time Ross rutted into him, displacing the cum inside of Spy with sickening squelches.

Ross’s slow, methodical thrusts carried on far longer than the others’ had. Eventually, the mercenaries began to smoke and chat among themselves as Ross fucked Spy at the other end of the table. Demo tried to reassure himself with the knowledge that most of them were done with Spy. Doc seemed to have no interest in using Spy sexually, and Darling made no move to do so at the moment.

Demo watched the two men closely. While the other mercenaries laughed, Doc conversed with Darling in hushed tones at the head of the table. The pair occasionally glanced at Demo. Demo couldn’t hear what they were saying about him, but he knew that he wanted no part of it.

Demo attempted to recall the route he had taken to the plantation. If he and Spy had to escape on foot, they could evade the mercenaries in the jungle and make their way back to civilization. He had been only somewhat drunk before he arrived to Darling’s generous supply of whisky, and so he could still remember the course of his journey.

Ross let out a guttural moan and bent forward, crushing Spy under his flak jacket as he built towards climax. Spy’s legs hung limp over Ross’s shoulders, his thighs clenching occasionally with perfunctory subservience.

Bea clapped as Ross finally swayed upright and stepped back from Spy. “New record.”

“Yes, I trust that you are all satisfied,” Darling said. “Would anyone like another glass of wine? Kamis!” He snapped his fingers, summoning the servant boy from the pool. The boy appeared from the hall and timidly approached the mercenaries. None of them acknowledged Kamis except for Ross, whose eyes followed Kamis wherever he went. Demo had nearly resigned himself to defeat, but now his rage returned stronger than ever.

At that moment, Spy erupted in a violent coughing fit. He spasmed, rolled on to his stomach, and heaved up a whitish wad of sick. The table of mercenaries groaned and laughed, and Kamis fled the room.

“Feeling unwell, Lapointe?” asked Doc, raising an eyebrow.

Spy dragged his knuckles over the back of his mouth, as if there was any point in wiping his face after multiple people had cum on and into it. “I apologize,” he rasped.

“I accept your apology.” Darling reached into his lap as if he was removing his dinner napkin, but instead of a serviette, he held a white buttoned shirt. Demo recognized the collar. It was Spy’s shirt, a deliciously smooth garment of unquestionable taste. Darling tossed the fine shirt into the various puddles of effluvia on the table and sneered, “Now, clean up.”

Demo tried not to bite down on the filthy necktie in his mouth. He had a terrible feeling that the shirt would soon replace it, and he knew then that he had to take advantage of the old mercenaries’ post-coital weakness and fight. He pressed his thumbs against his palms and tried to slip the handcuffs. The metal skinned his knuckles and shaved off his flesh as Demo worked the cuffs around his hands. He was close, so close.

Darling addressed the table, seemingly unaware of Demo’s renewed attempts to escape. “I’ve something in mind for the evening, but first, lunch. Worry not,” he chuckled, “I had a separate dining room prepared.”

Darling’s tepid excuse for humor was an effective distraction. Demo stopped fighting the cuffs as the party walked past him, leaving him alone in the room with Spy. Strangely, Spy continued to clean the table with his shirt in total silence.

Demo shouted through the necktie as a reminder, but Spy didn’t help him. The soiled fabric, the taste of which Demo had managed to endure so far through sheer adrenaline, was now unbearable. Demo needed it out of his mouth that second. He yelled muffled expletives at Spy, rattling his cuffs against the chair.

A bolt of lightning hit his left arm. That was the sensation, but Demo was blind on that side, and with his arms bound behind him, he had no idea what had caused the pain. He turned his head as far he could to the left. Something was stabbing into him, and he couldn’t see it.

“ _Arrête_ ,” croaked Spy, unable to scream. He barely sounded like himself. “He’s not involved in this.”

“I would say that he’s involved.” The point of pressure receded from deep within Demo’s muscle, and suddenly the back of Demo’s arm was wet with blood, from his armpit to his wrist. “Go on, DeGroot,” Doc encouraged. “Free yourself.”

Demo threw himself against the cuffs with renewed vigor. They were slippery now, but every time he twisted his arm, he was rendered immobile with agony as the wound split along his tricep. Already, spots swam in his narrowing field of vision.

Doc crossed in front of Demo, holding a bloody scalpel in his hand. “Oh, look, he needs medical attention. He’ll have to stay overnight.”

Spy responded with a string of angry French that Demo couldn’t understand with a clear head, much less the state he was in now. Demo struggled to remain conscious as blood drained from his arm. At the end of a long tunnel, Spy and Doc spoke to one another in nonsense words, until darkness swallowed them.


	4. Chapter 4

Blinding light dawned above Demo’s eye. Blurred vision was his only workable sense. He felt nothing, heard nothing, and smelled only the rank odor of his own sick and blood. His dry tongue swelled to fill his mouth and forced him to breathe through his crushed nostrils.

A shadow passed across the light and continued over Demo’s body, towards his feet. He attempted to lift his head and follow its path, but he could not move any part of himself except for his eye and his miserable mouth.

Pressure pierced his navel. There was no pain, and yet there was a sense of violation, penetration. His innards shifted and separated, splitting open along the center.

Faint, deep sounds reached Demo’s ear, echoing as if through water. When he concentrated, he decoded them into words: “...same place in the abdomen. He was always…”

The point of pressure continued to travel through Demo’s core, followed by the feeling of his guts being sucked from the cavern of his torso. Demo could not lift his arms to protect himself. His screams never left his head.

Finally, something snapped loose from within Demo, and the pressure ceased. Demo felt the remnants of his guts as they settled back into the voided space.

“...obsessed with pregnancy.” A dark red shape wriggled in front of Demo. He squinted, but he could not tell what it was—it appeared to be a sort of organ, stolen from his insides. “See this? He made you a mother.”

The lump of flesh withdrew, and Demo followed it to the shadow that loomed at his side. “I would never violate my boys’ trust like that,” said Doc. He tossed the organ into a metal pan.

Cold sweat dripped from Demo’s brow. As his vision adjusted, he recognized the sterile walls and harsh, cold lighting of a surgical studio. Leather cuffs bound his limbs and head to a slab, and a stiff block beneath his shoulders pushed his chest higher than his chin. The immobility of his head was, perhaps, a small mercy, as he couldn’t look down at the chasm that Doc had cut into chest.

“Relax, DeGroot,” said Doc. He dabbed Demo’s face with a soft gray towel. “I’m helping you. You didn’t want to gestate a baboon fetus, did you?”

“What,” Demo spoke with great effort. He could feel his lungs as they inflated and expanded into the open air. His cracked sternum and open ribs creaked together, and yawned apart. “What are ye…”

Doc reached across Demo and pulled the mechanical arm of a device into view overhead. Demo recognized a stationary version of the Medigun. This machine was identical to Medic’s in every way, including the droning hum as it activated, and the ozone smell of the mist that flowed from the Medigun’s barrel. The healing mist billowed into Demo’s open chest cavity, and Demo groaned in relief as his ribs pulled back together under his knitting flesh.

“You mercenaries are all the same,” tutted Doc. “You join TF and sign your bodies away to experimentation without reading the fine print. Did you ever think to ask what your Medic was doing in those weekly surgeries?”

Demo had been consistently blackout drunk during his time in Medic’s care, but he didn’t see any reason to confess that to Doc. “Medic didn’t do this to me,” Demo growled. “You did. You stabbed me.”

Doc slapped Demo’s arm, which bore no trace of the wound. “All better. Don’t be such a baby,” he chided sunnily, reminding Demo of Medic’s uncanny cheer in the face of pain and suffering. In fact, much of Doc’s mannerisms resembled Medic’s, although they looked nothing alike—Doc was squarer in the head, blonder in the hair, and several decades older than Medic. Perhaps it was the lab coat.

“Who are ye?” Demo asked. “Tell me what’s going on, yeh bastard!”

“I’m the only ally you have at the moment.” Doc pushed the nozzle of the Medigun away from Demo as the healing process completed. “When the boys and I retired from TF—or, as you would know it, RED—you gentlemen replaced us. Unlike them, I don’t resent you for it.”

“So yer getting back at us fer taking yer jobs?” asked Demo, as he groped at the cuffs with his fingers, searching for the lock and buckle.

Doc shook his head. “We’re merely continuing a tradition that started when Lapointe joined TF. Before he became ‘Spy,’” Doc said, intoning his disdain for the title, “he was nothing but a prostitute in Darling’s employ. He had to earn his promotion through strenuous work, if you catch my meaning.”

Demo tried not to imagine what that work entailed. “I don’t understand,” he said. “RED pays us millions of dollars a year. Spy is filthy rich now. Why’s he still selling himself, then?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s not about the money. This is what he wants. He always loved it.”

“I don’t believe yeh. Something’s not right about this.”

“Lapointe is a depraved gutter whore, and he wants to be treated as such.” Doc shook his head in disappointment. “For all his talents, he can only put himself back in the dirt.”

“Darling’s got something on him,” Demo guessed. “It has to be blackmail.”

“Poor imbecile. I didn’t want to tell you this,” sighed Doc, “but I feel sorry for you.”

Demo narrowed his eye.

“Lapointe intends to die here. Permanently. He asked me to use my former credentials to disconnect him from Respawn.”

Demo clenched his jaw and tried to overpower the leather cuffs with brute force. “Fuck!” he screamed. “Let me up!”

“In a moment,” answered Doc. “First, I need to tell you where Darling keeps the gunpowder. You will need a great deal of it for your next task.”

Demo had improvised enough explosive devices to understand the implication. Apparently, Doc wanted to destroy the entire plantation. “Yer working against Darling?” Demo asked warily.

“Not exactly. I don’t want you to kill him.” Doc smiled, wrinkling his broad, pale face. “I want you to kill _me._ ”

“I’ll do it with me bare hands,” promised Demo. “I’ll strangle all of ye.”

Doc shook his head. “I won’t let you kill Darling or the boys, but if you follow my plan, you will have the satisfaction of destroying a majority share of Darling’s fortune—and,” he continued, as Demo started to argue, “you will save Lapointe in the process.”

“I can save him this minute if ye let me up,” Demo reminded Doc.

“Don’t be stupid. Even if you _could_ sweep Lapointe away to safety, you would not change what he is. If you don’t destroy this house, he will return. It’s the source of too many memories."

Demo hated that everyone around him seemed to have a deep and intimate understanding of Spy’s private history, while he was left guessing. “How do ye know all this?”

“I told you,” Doc dismissed him, “I worked for TF in the old days.” He selected a syringe from the arrangement of tools at his left and flashed it to Demo as a warning. “Behave yourself, and I’ll let you go.”

Demo forced himself to be still as Doc reached over him and unbuckled the leather cuffs around his limbs and head. Doc stepped back, still wielding the syringe, and Demo cautiously sat up. He did not feel so much as a twinge of pain. Even his hangover was gone. Aside from his lingering fear and worry, Demo could not have felt better.

“While you plant the explosives throughout the house, I will distract the boys from their revelry,” said Doc. “It’s important that I am the only one left in the house when it detonates. They have to know that I’m dead—that I could not have possibly survived.”

“Aren’t the lot of ye connected to Respawn, too?” asked Demo.

“We were disconnected upon the occasion of our retirement. Ah-ah! Stop thinking it,” Doc scolded, waving his finger in Demo’s face. “You won’t have time to save Lapointe _and_ kill the rest. As we speak, he is preparing for his final act.”

Demo’s stomach, though freshly mended, twisted with agonizing concern for Spy. “What’s that?”

“It’s better if you don’t know—”

“Hell with that!” Demo lunged at Doc, who nimbly stepped out of reach. “I’m done playing along with yer sick games!” Doc’s scalpel was still on the table. Demo snatched it up and brandished it like a dagger. “I don’t need yer help. I’ll kill everyone in this fucking place and drag his arse home.”

“He’ll be dead by then,” Doc answered, as he stared placidly at Demo. His aged face disturbed Demo with its sudden absence of expression. “It may already be too late. I planned to keep him alive if you were too slow in the demolitions process, but I can’t mend his wounds if I, too, am dead.”

“Mend his…” Demo looked around the room and focused on the surgery station with the oversized Medigun. “I’ll bring him here.”

Doc backed away from Demo until he reached a panel in the wall. He opened the metal door to the circuit breaker, grasped a handful of plastic-coated wires in his palm, and ripped.

The Medigun behind Demo flashed and sparked. A series of mechanical screeches, each duller than the last, rang out from the circuit breaker and the Medigun alike, until both pieces of equipment died.

Doc tossed the frayed wires to the floor. “Now, you have wasted enough time. You must hurry if you want to help save him.”

A wordless scream of rage ripped out of Demo. He rushed Doc, who evaded him as a matador evades a bull.

“Time is ticking, DeGroot,” Doc reminded him, tapping an imaginary watch on his wrist. “If you continue to delay me, I won’t be able to intervene to save Lapointe’s life.”

“I don’t trust ye!” shouted Demo. “Conniving old fuck!”

“I didn’t ask for your trust. Do your job, DeGroot. Are you a demolitions expert, or are you a medical expert?” Doc sneered at Demo’s affronted silence. “Rig the house, and I’ll keep Lapointe alive.”

As much as Demo resented Doc, he had no choice but to believe him. That Spy wanted to die was not difficult for Demo to accept. Suicide seemed like the natural result of Spy’s self-loathing masochism. Without Respawn, nothing stood between Spy and the void that was death.

Demo’s anger cooled as he remembered the terrifying emptiness that he experienced through the Respawn process. He had once thought that the peace of death would be a blessed end to his grief and pain. Now, he could only imagine Spy fading like the last wisp of smoke from a snuffed cigarette.

“All right,” grunted Demo. “Let’s stop wasting time, then.”

Doc’s face split in cruel glee. “Lapointe is lucky to have a friend like you.”

 

* * *

 

Demo prodded nervously at his missing eye as he walked, alone, through Darling’s mansion. Doc had returned Demo's clothing sans eyepatch. With his empty socket exposed, Demo felt more naked than ever.

Doc’s promised cache of gunpowder was located in Darling’s private arsenal. Demo entered the six digit code in the keypad beside the steel door. The security lock hissed open, and automatic lights flickered inside.

Darling displayed his vast collection of historical firearms behind glass, in velvet cases. His obsession with hunting clearly went beyond the taxidermied trophies that lined the mansion’s halls. Not a speck of dust marred the rifles’ rich wood handles or gleaming steel barrels.

Due to his poor depth perception, Demo had little use for traditional guns, but he had learned about them through attending weapons exhibitions with Soldier. He would be stupid to leave unarmed. The glass case in the center of Darling’s arsenal held the most modern-looking weapons. These were likely Darling’s hunting tools of choice. Demo stole two at random: one for himself, and one for Spy. The two guns looked to be in good repair. If they didn’t fire, they would still be serviceable truncheons.

The guns’ corresponding ammunition was stored beside barrels of gunpowder. The barrels themselves were historical objects, displayed with the greatest effort towards authenticity. Demo sighed in cruel pleasure as he imagined destroying Darling’s meticulous private museum.

Focusing on his singular purpose at the moment, to demolish the house, was all that kept Demo from going mad. He had no idea what was happening to Spy as he worked. Demo could not imagine anything worse than what he had already seen, but he had also learned that there was no limit to the depravity of Darling and his guests.

Demo expected to encounter said guests as he exited the armory with a bevy of improvised pipe bombs in his arms. However, Demo seemed to be alone in the house, except for the countless animal heads. As he roamed through the halls, attaching explosives to weak points in the mansion’s structure, he did not even see or hear the servants. Doc must have coaxed everyone outside, as intended.

Demo himself had no way of seeing out from the mansion’s inner halls. Most of the rooms were locked, and the rare open windows looked out into the dark of midnight. The passage of time struck Demo then. How long had it been since he arrived here? How many minutes, or hours, or days, had he spent unconscious on the operating table? Could he even be sure that anyone else remained at the mansion? What if Doc had sent him on a fool’s errand? Worst of all, what if Spy knew, and abandoned him long ago?

Demo set the final pipe bomb with a sense of dread. He retained four of the explosives in case of an emergency, carrying them inside the lining of his vest. Now, according to Doc’s plan, Demo was to exit the house from the front door. He was to follow the cobblestone path to the edge of the dirt road that led to civilization, and then he would look back and wait for Doc’s signal, which would be to cut the power to the entire house for two seconds before restoring it. At that point, Demo would press the button on the detonator, activating the receiver on each of the planted bombs and triggering their synchronized explosion. Doc had given Demo his word that Spy would come to him afterwards. He said that Spy would simply walk down the path into Demo’s arms.

Doc had gravely underestimated Demo’s intelligence if he thought that Demo would believe such a fairy tale. The old man wanted to fake his own death, and that meant leaving everything behind. What reason did he have to tell Demo the truth? No, Demo would find Spy himself, and liberate him by force. He would take pleasure in killing every last one of the mercenaries, so that no one would be left to know if Doc was alive or dead.

Demo tucked the detonator inside his vest pocket and held the stolen rifles at the ready as he roamed through the mansion. The courtyard and pool were empty, indicating that the party had moved outside the walls of the mansion, into the oil palm fields.

Demo found a door that opened to the back of the mansion. A decorative wrought iron fence separated the building from the sprawling rows of trees, which receded boundlessly into the night. Demo searched the darkness and noticed a dim light in the distance, bleeding between the leaves.

Demo approached the light through the trees. He made every effort to move as stealthily as he could. Fortunately, the recent lack of alcohol in his system allowed him to balance on the balls of his feet, and gave him the awareness to avoid rustling the low-hanging palm fronds.

Voices and laughter reached Demo’s ears as he drew closer. The hushed conversation was impossible to decipher, until Demo reached the crest of a hill and looked down into a shallow valley.

Darling and the group of mercenaries, including Doc, gathered around a stone-edged fire pit. The Malay servant boy stood beside them and served drinks. They sat in the same expensive outdoor furniture that decorated Darling’s courtyard, and the floor beneath the fire pit was paved, indicating the frequent use of the space. They were arranged in a half circle, so that each member of the group could look inside a fenced area nearby. This fence was not curlicued iron, but reinforced steel.

Inside the fence, Spy was bound with rope to a wooden sawhorse. His fingers clawed at the dirt as he sluggishly attempted, and failed, to lift his head. He seemed drugged, incapable of defending himself even if he was free.

The fireside conversation suddenly fell silent. Demo wondered why, until he heard a sound like a living rasp of thunder.

A tiger prowled along the edge of the fence, circling Spy. Its stripes played tricks with the darkness, such that Demo did not trust it was there until it stepped into the fire light. The massive cat wrinkled its lip and bared its teeth as it sniffed the air around Spy.

Demo’s hands shook as he took aim with one of the rifles. He could not trust his eye in the daytime, let alone in darkness. If he missed the tiger and shot Spy, there would be no Respawn and no Medigun to help him.

The tiger only drew closer to Spy as Demo hesitated. As its mouth splayed open, its teeth glittered orange. It approached Spy from behind, and, to Demo’s surprise, shifted its weight to its back feet and grasped Spy’s shoulders in its gigantic paws.

“Oh, fuck,” whispered Demo, as he realized that Spy was not meant to be the tiger’s dinner.

Spy muffled a cry with his clenched teeth as the tiger mounted and penetrated him. Spy struggled to keep silent throughout the unnatural, painful act, and he could be heard whimpering underneath the tiger’s huffing growls.

“He’ll be feeling the barbs now,” Darling described, swirling his glass of wine at a manic speed. “The tiger’s penis is lined with barbs—”

“Yeah, honey, we know,” said Bea. She leaned her chin in her hand as she observed the activity within the cage.

The tiger engulfed Spy in its bulk. Its spine arched as it bent double over Spy and bunched its hips against his arse in short, pulsing thrusts. Its open maw shed strings of saliva along Spy’s back. Spy’s shoulders twisted helplessly, until the tiger lowered its mouth to Spy’s neck, and he stilled in terror as its breath ruffled his hair.

Crouching on the hill, Demo felt just as helpless. He could either risk a shot that would almost certainly hit Spy, and possibly provoke the tiger into killing Spy regardless; or, he could attack the mercenaries, the noise and excitement of which would certainly provoke the tiger.

“You have sick tastes, Darling,” said Ross. Although he spoke to Darling, he stared openly at the servant boy, Kamis. Ross gestured, and Kamis reluctantly approached him. Ross placed his hand on the boy’s back and pulled him closer, pushing his knee between the boy’s legs. Demo bit back an enraged growl. The others simply ignored Ross as he molested the child.

At that moment, the tiger emitted a roar that shocked the group into silence. Spy’s sedatives appeared to be wearing off. Spy writhed and fought violently under the animal, and the tiger responded by grasping Spy in its claws and mouthing his neck in warning. Rather than submit, Spy only thrashed harder, until blood dripped down his neck and shoulders.

“Lapointe, calm yourself,” ordered Doc. “Those hormones can only do so much. Don’t upset it.”

“Is it finally gonna eat him?” asked Jones. “I thought it liked the faggot.”

As the mercenaries gaped at Spy and the tiger, Kamis attempted to escape from Ross’s grasp. Ross only dragged the boy closer, forcing Kamis to sit in his lap. The tiger’s growls, and the sound of the sawhorse creaking as Spy struggled underneath the animal, drowned out the boy’s quiet protests.

Demo needed a distraction large enough to stop everything. Bullets wouldn’t do. He exchanged the rifle for the detonator in his vest. His thumb hovered on the button. There was still a chance that the explosion would provoke the tiger into killing Spy.

The tiger had almost completely obscured Spy from view in its vast flanks, but as it curled in half over Spy and continued its frenzied mating, Spy’s head emerged from its parted maw. The tiger’s fangs had already punctured the surface of Spy’s neck, and now its teeth locked in place around his spinal cord. A single bite would remove Spy’s head.

“Vern, no!” ejaculated Darling. Demo looked back at the group in time to see Doc stand and point a pistol inside the cage. The gun fired with a pneumatic puff, and a dart pierced the tiger’s side. The tiger, more shocked than in pain, released Spy from its mouth and lifted its head to look back at the source of the sting.

Doc fired again, landing another dart beside the first. The tiger’s head swayed from side to side, drooping drowsily. Darling cursed and complained as Doc approached the cage.

Demo hit the detonator. Instant light and heat roared behind him as the mansion burst into a fiery nexus of explosions that transformed the night sky from black to red. He flattened himself to the ground and began to circle downhill in the midst of the ensuing chaos.

“Holy  _shit,”_ gasped Bea. She stood to view the glowing horizon. “It’s beautiful.”

Jones jumped to his feet and racked a shotgun. “Fall in,” he barked.

Ross shoved Kamis out of his lap and loaded a gun of his own. The other mercenaries followed suit. Meanwhile, Kamis fled into the palm fields, disappearing instantly among the rows of trees.

“That nigger did it,” said Greg. He rolled a grenade in his palms. “He thinks he knows how to blow a building? I’m gonna shove this down his throat.”

Demo withdrew one of the pipe bombs from his vest. He may have been a poor shot with a gun, but he had a good arm, and the fire pit was a large and luminous target. Demo inhaled slowly, estimated the distance, and hurled the bomb into the flames.

As the projectile arced through the air, Jones spun and fired at the source of movement. Shotgun pellets sprayed the oil palms around Demo, and he lunged behind the trees for cover.

The pipe bomb exploded from heat before it hit the ground. The shock wave scattered the mercenaries in a smouldering ring. Their twisted bodies tangled with the metal chairs in which they had been sitting. Beyond the carnage, scattered fires consumed the trees. The oil-rich palm fruits ignited and burst with loud pops, firing their burning seeds in every direction. Soon, the entire plantation would be a death trap.

Demo peered out from behind a palm trunk. None of the bodies moved as he counted them. There was Darling, with a twisted neck; Jones, with a chair embedded in his sternum; Bea, splayed on her stomach in a pool of blood; Ross, whose beard and face were reduced to a single oozing hole; and Greg, whose grenade had detonated in his own hand, demolishing his arm to the shoulder.

Demo began to approach, until he saw movement within the cage. Doc had crouched down for safety behind the steel bars. Now, the old man stood, brushing dirt and debris from his coat. He looked back at his dead friends and scoffed.

The other two inhabitants of the cage had also been spared from the explosion. The tiger slumped over Spy with its limbs sprawled in the dirt. The two darts in its side rendered the animal as limp and listless as Spy himself.

“Look at the mess you’ve made,” Doc shouted. He kicked the tiger in the ribs with his boot, dislodging it from Spy and knocking it to the ground. Spy hung over the sawhorse like a wet rag. He did not move when Doc pointed the dart gun at his head. “Come out!” called Doc. “Come out, or I’ll put one in his eye.”

Demo stepped out from behind a tree, rifle in hand. “Drop it,” Doc ordered. “Hands in the air.” Demo lowered the rifle and began to walk downhill with his arms raised. The three remaining pipe bombs in his vest lining thumped against his chest with every step.

Doc turned the dart gun on Demo. “That’s it,” he said. “You thought you could outsmart me, you subhuman mongrel?”

Beside Doc, Spy’s limbs twitched. Demo forced himself not to react as Spy slowly began to move and twist his hands in the knotted rope.

Doc was focused entirely on Demo, whom he continued to threaten with the dart gun as Demo approached the open gate in the steel fence. “I am going to cut you into pieces and keep your head alive. You can watch as I harvest him for parts.”

“Where do ye plan tae do that?” Demo responded, glaring into Doc’s eyes. He was determined to keep Doc’s full attention while Spy regained consciousness and slipped the ropes. “I destroyed yer wee lab back there. All yer equipment. Gone, just like yer sick friends.”

Doc bared his teeth in a cruel smile. “You’re going to pay for that many times over.”

“ _Je ne pense pas,_ ” snarled Spy. In one fluid movement, he sprang to his feet, snatched the scalpel from Doc’s pocket, and opened Doc’s throat from ear to ear with a slash of the blade. Blood sprayed from Doc’s neck as the old man dropped to his knees and collapsed facedown in the dirt.

Spy staggered and grasped the sawhorse for balance. His burst of adrenaline faded as abruptly as it came, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he sank to the ground.

Demo caught Spy in his arms. Spy leaned into Demo’s chest. The fire, and the sounds of exploding palm fruit, built to a riot around them. Thick, rancid smoke obscured the night sky.

Demo shed his vest and took off his shirt. He offered the clothing to Spy. Spy looked at the shirt, and then at Demo. His eyes filled with tears. He lowered his head to hide them, pressing his lips to Demo’s jaw. Demo gently cradled Spy’s head and tilted his face into a deep kiss. Spy’s soft tongue yielded as Demo tipped him back, and his heartbeat grew fast and erratic against Demo’s bare chest.

Demo stroked Spy’s neck as their lips parted. “We need to go,” said Demo.

Spy’s circled Demo’s waist with his arms. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. Demo had only a second to wonder what he meant before he felt a stabbing pain in his back. Spy gritted his teeth as he plunged the scalpel into Demo’s lung.

Suffocating pressure built in Demo’s chest. Blood gurgled in his throat. He collapsed against Spy and clutched him with a weakening grip.

Spy jerked the scalpel loose and pulled Demo into his lap, shushing him. He held Demo’s hands tightly in his own and stroked Demo’s clammy palms with his fingers. “ _Mon grand,_ ” whispered Spy. “ _Mon amour._ ”

Demo could not tell if the bubbling heat inside of him was happiness or impending heart failure. He was unable to respond to the words that he had always wanted to hear. As strength and feeling bled out of the wound in his back, Demo could only languish in Spy’s arms.

All things considered, it was one of Demo’s better deaths.


	5. Chapter 5

Early morning mists rolled across the lapping waters of Loch Ness. Gentle sunlight bloomed behind the hazy green hills, casting pink bands into the sky.

As he had every morning since he learned of Nessie, young Tavish stood on the shore, searching the water with his father’s binoculars. His adoptive parents encouraged Tavish’s interest in cryptozoology in an attempt to distract him from his more worrisome obsession with explosives. When Tavish asked for a chemistry set for his eighth birthday, so that he could “make things go kablooey,” his parents instead gifted him with a first edition of _The Loch Ness Monster_ by R.T. Gould. Tavish’s disappointment turned to glee when he recognized the photograph that had first captured his imagination from an old newspaper clipping on his mother’s office wall.

Tavish related to Nessie. Much like the mysterious, prehistoric creature that none could identify, Tavish felt like an outsider in Scotland, often the subject of ridicule and demeaning fascination. It did not matter that his parents adopted him as a baby, nor that Drumnadrochit was the only home that Tavish had ever known. When others looked at him, they saw their preconceptions about his blackness first. He was then tasked with winning them over and convincing them of his personhood.

Tavish imagined that Nessie was also from a foreign land and time. She was a contemporary of the T. Rex and the Pterodactyl. Millions of years ago, she settled in the loch and cleverly avoided mass extinction under its deep, fresh waters, where she froze in stasis during the Ice Age. She thawed just as humans reached Scotland and began fighting over who would build the first castles. There was no doubt in Tavish’s mind that Nessie watched all of history from her throne within the loch. When her existence became an open secret, Scotland made the foreign creature a symbol of their cultural mythology, adopting her and naming her as one of their own.

Perhaps, if Tavish had a kinder spirit, he would have let Nessie live as she had for millennia. With coldly precocious logic, Tavish decided that the way to validate himself in the eyes of his countrymen would be to provide proof of Nessie’s existence by literally blowing her out of the water. He would turn a modest, fringe tourist industry into a worldwide phenomenon. He would be a true Scottish hero.

Tavish became a thief in the name of his honorable work. He stole demolitions manuals, chemistry sets, fireworks, and potash. He hoarded saltpeter and pissed through rocks for two years, until he had enough explosives to empty the entire loch. He hid them in the cellar of his parents’ house, behind their unused ski and golf equipment.

Tavish was at school when a freak accident sparked the explosives under the house. The resulting blast triggered a cave-in that crushed his parents to death. Tavish returned home to a blockade of police cars. He did not have to admit or describe anything, as the police knew at once what had happened: these nice white people had paid a gruesome price for adopting an unstable foreign boy. They showed Tavish the mangled bodies of his parents and told him that he was going to be locked away for the rest of his life. They did not care how many times he said that he was sorry. Sorry did not bring his parents back.

As a minor, Tavish evaded the extreme punishment that the local law enforcement wanted for him. Their harshest measure was to send him to the Ullapool Grammar School for Orphans. Only the most troubled orphan boys attended this school, where their instructors strictly regimented every hour.

Tavish gained a reputation immediately when he attacked another boy who loudly pointed out that Tavish was the only black child in the school. The boy and his friends took a vengeful interest in Tavish. After Tavish returned from his punishment in isolation, they spied on Tavish at all times, until they noticed Tavish reading the demolitions manual that Tavish saved from the rubble of his home.

The boys informed the school staff, and when they searched Tavish's belongings, they found the early stages of his newest explosive devices.

Tavish very nearly spent the rest of his life in an institution. When the staff confronted him, he flew into a rage and tried to detonate the explosives, but they weren't working yet.

Tavish was confined to isolation for the rest of his time in Ullapool. He will never forget the cramped room with the grey cot and the single sliver of a window. Several times a day, there would be a knock on his door. When Tavish answered, “Hello?” he heard giggling and running in the hall outside. Tavish screamed threats at them. From that moment on, knocking on Tavish's door and running while he shouted was a class tradition.

Tavish would have left the orphanage a raving madman if word hadn't spread about his fascination with explosives. One day, the door to Tavish's cell opened, and two blind black people stood before him.

“Me boy,” said the woman. She held out her arms in Tavish’s general direction.

Tavish stared at them. They both wore dark glasses and walked with canes. Their sheer unusualness appealed to him.

“Come on now, lad, give yer mum a hug,” said the man. His wiry gray beard reminded Tavish of his adoptive father’s, but his man didn't look as nice. “We did come all this way.”

Tavish dragged his feet across the floor and put his arms around the strange woman.

“Yer coming home with us,” she said fiercely in Tavish's ear, “and we'll teach ye how to make a proper bomb!”

Instantly, the hug became a genuine expression of love between Tavish and his mum. Tavish never expected that his fascination with explosives would be rewarded or encouraged. Not only did his birth parents accept him, but they also offered him redemption. He would be a good son, one deserving of good parents.

Tavish learned about the DeGroot clan, their reputation as the Highland Demolition Men, their sacred scrumpy, and their tradition of abandoning their children at birth and retrieving them only if they proved their innate skill. This tradition cemented in Tavish the notion that he had to toil for every scrap of love and honor.

Tavish took every demolitions job he could: public, private, military, and otherwise. One of these jobs resulted in the loss of his eye, but that was a natural consequence of hard work. Eventually, just as his parents had discovered him in his youth by following his trail of destruction, the Reliable Excavation and Demolition company took an interest in Tavish.

RED sent a beautiful stranger to recruit him. His name was—

_Spy_

—and he met Tavish in—

_New Mexico_

—after which Tavish signed a contract for employment from 1968 onwards. At present, in 1972, he was still employed with RED. He worked with eight other men and they referred to one another by their job title. Tavish identified such with his title, Demoman, that his birth name no longer felt like his primary moniker. Everyone called him Demo. He called himself Demo in his own head, these days.

Spy called him—

 

* * *

 

Medic turned his head away from Demo’s open skull and spat a feather to the side. “Pah! Archimedes, go to your house,” he scolded.

The dove fluttered into the rafters, showering Medic and Demo with more downy fluff. Medic waved his hand over Demo in a spirited effort to protect him from the contaminants. It was a losing battle; fortunately, the Medigun poised over the stretcher would prevent Demo from contracting any infections.

Medic wiped shreds of gray matter on a surgical towel. He readied his scalpel again and leaned over Demo’s inert corpse. His work was nearly done, and yet, he hesitated.

“Are you sure you want to do this, _mein freund_?” he asked.

Spy did not respond. Medic knew where he was: for hours, Spy stood on the catwalk of the Team Fortress Industries lab, chain smoking until a blue haze blanketed the ceiling. Spy stared down from the catwalk to the lower level, which warehoused rows upon rows of still, nude specimens. These were the remains of every mercenary that had ever worked for the company, waiting _in situ_ to be replicated into living copies. Only one of these vats was empty, and its inhabitant was currently under Medic’s knife.

“I can stop here,” said Medic. “I can revive him with his memories intact.”

Spy flicked his burning ashes off the catwalk. They landed on the glass that contained his own lifeless twin. “Remove them all,” he answered.

Medic tutted and turned back to Demo’s exposed brain. He had cut the organ open to expose the hippocampus. Multiple nodes connected Demo’s brain tissue to a battery. Electricity pulsed into the brain, twitching and swelling sections of gray and white matter. Medic sorted through them deftly. He teased out tiny slivers of flesh and rearranged their positions. As the Medigun fused the pieces back together, the new connections changed Demo’s perception of time and edit the facts of his reality.

Medic had perfected this technique on Demo. The alcoholic’s constant blackouts already forced him to reshape his own memories around the gaps in his recollection. He was extremely suggestible and trusting of Medic, and so the subtlest physiological change produced a dramatic result as Demo accepted whatever fiction Medic planted in his head. Medic had lost track of the many surgeries he had performed in the service of rewriting Demo’s history with Spy and erasing Demo’s knowledge of the greater machinations behind Team Fortress, but the most recent mishap was certainly the most dramatic yet.

When Medic completed the procedure and removed the electrical nodes, he had restored Demo to his prototypical state. All memories of Spy, save for chaste professional encounters, were smeared on a paper towel and destined for the incinerator.

“Do it right this time,” Spy said bitterly, from high above.

Medic threw his scalpel across the room, impacting a row of test tubes and shattering glass over the surface of his desk. “I am a genius!” he shouted. “Why don’t you leave him alone?! You’re ruining everything!”

“He followed me!” Spy screamed back, clutching the rails of the catwalk. “I tried to get rid of him, but he wouldn’t go away. _J’en ai ras le bol,_ ” he moaned, lighting another cigarette.

Medic seethed as he replaced the crown of Demo’s skull. There was no need to stitch the skin back together, since the Medigun would heal the wound completely. Medic jabbed a needle through the skin regardless. Sewing calmed his nerves.

Spy marched back and forth along the elevated metal walkway. Usually silent, his footsteps rang out in defiance.

“Stop that,” said Medic. “Go wait somewhere else. I’m finished, anyway.”

“We should decommission him,” said Spy.

Medic about-faced, needle in hand. He felt a tug as the surgical thread ripped through Demo’s scalp. “ _Was?_ After all this?”

“Not him,” Spy said, waving his hand dismissively at Demo’s body. “ _Him._ ” He pointed directly below. He had walked over to the row of vats that contained the earlier generation of mercenaries, including Darling as a single outlier. Preserved in the prime stage of life, their bodies lay in suspended animation.

“Don’t be stupid,” Medic said. “There’s more than one of him out there.” He turned back to Demo and began snipping the tangled knot of surgical thread out of Demo’s rapidly healing scalp. “Now I have to clean up your mess.”

Smoke billowed from Spy’s nostrils as he snorted in frustration. “Coward.”

“That makes two of us, _Lapointe._ ” Medic snapped off his soiled gloves and exchanged them for a fresh pair before he wheeled Demo’s stretcher back to his open vat. Medic tilted the stretcher, spilling Demo’s body into the horizontally oriented capsule. Preservative liquid splashed over the sides as Demo’s corpse sank into repose. When Medic closed the glass panel over Demo’s face, a pipe pumped fresh preservative into the tank, sealing Demo within.

“He’ll Respawn in an hour,” Medic said. “Go and give him a kiss.”

“Shut up.” Spy stomped his last cigarette underfoot and activated his watch, obscuring himself in cloaking mist.

Medic listened, although he didn’t expect to hear Spy’s departure, and waited until he was reasonably sure that he was alone.

As the vats of preservative bubbled and churned, and the machines within the large industrial space of the lab hummed in electrical consonance, Medic paced along the rows of bodies that dated back to 1860. The earliest mercenaries had been in advanced stages of decay when Medic first liberated them from their graves, but their core genetic material remained intact. Medic looked at the skeletons beneath the parchment-like flesh and smiled in fond recollection before he continued down the line.

Medic came to a halt before the 1930 edition of the team. He unfolded a list of the deceased from his pocket and approached the corresponding vats. Each featured its own control panel and keypad, into which Medic typed the unique Respawn codes for decommissioned assets.

Medic activated four vats: the heavy, the pyro, the demolition man, and the soldier. He scanned the paper and found Darling’s unique code, which he typed next. The galvanized floor hummed beneath the soles of his boots as the hidden machinery within the laboratory building responded to the commands and began the Respawn process.

Medic spun on his heel and activated the lights that revealed the room behind a one-way mirror. He observed closely as organic matter spun like candy floss within the preservative fluid. Strings of genetic material collided and adhered together, rebuilding the bodies of mercenaries from a micro- to a macroscopic level.

This organic material did not manifest _ex nihilo_ within Respawn. The system worked by harvesting cadavers, breaking them down to a cellular level, and reforming the human tissue by the DNA blueprint of the intended subjects, which were the bodies stored within vats on the warehouse floor. Through this alchemy, Medic could effectively grind up any person in the world and put them back together as someone else, complete with any modifications that he may have added to the original model. Changing or reproducing their memories was as simple as replicating the physical structure of the prototype brain in the new copy. When the process completed, a teleporter within the vat transported the body to a predetermined location.

Although Medic had not invented Respawn, one of his greatest triumphs was perfecting the process on an industrial scale. As he watched the fresh bodies form at his command from the primal matter of the universe, he grasped, for a moment, the sublime godhood of creation.

Birds squawked and flurried overhead. Disrupted from his perch, Ptolemy alighted on the sculpted panels which framed the miracles of science that Medic so adored. The pigeon ruffled his wings. A grey string of excrement smeared across the glass and dripped to the floor.

Medic sighed, and retrieved the mop.


End file.
